Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the national Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services' budget is for the present financial year.

Information on expenditure on mental health is not collected centrally. There is, in addition, no single budget for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) since these are commissioned by clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), NHS England, local authorities (LAs) and by schools and comprise many different services.

NHS England only holds the budget for directly commissioned services and does not collect the data for services commissioned by CCGs and LAs.

NHS England has recently undertaken a data collection exercise on the CAMHS services it directly commissions to clarify the level of planned spend for 2014/15, within the individual Mental Health contracts. This data is still being validated and therefore a definitive figure is not available at this stage, however, the figures indicate that the planned spend is in the region of £260 million.

In addition, the NHS England Children and Young People’s Improving Access to Psychological Therapies Transformation programme of existing Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services is supporting services to deliver evidence based, outcomes focussed user-led services. Its budget is approximately £17 million for 2014-15.